


Bats in the Belfry

by CypressSunn



Category: Knives Out (2019)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vampires & Werewolves, F/M, Monster horror, Multifandom Horror Exchange
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-07
Updated: 2020-08-07
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:20:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25385929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CypressSunn/pseuds/CypressSunn
Summary: “What kind of vampire can’t keep her lunch down?”“What kind of a werewolf needs another to kill his prey?”
Relationships: Marta Cabrera/Ransom Drysdale
Comments: 12
Kudos: 129
Collections: 101 Prompts Meme, Multifandom Horror Exchange (2020)





	Bats in the Belfry

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TheYearOfTheWolf](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheYearOfTheWolf/gifts).



> Written for the MultiFandom Horror Exchange.  
> Prompt 101, #62: Bells

“What kind of vampire can’t keep her lunch down?” Ransom mutters snidely, sliding out from behind a marble pillar during intermission. They are at the opera, surrounded by an assemblage of the rich and greedy. Marta has already forgotten which classic is being performed and in what language. She keeps her eyes level with the predator before her as he sidles up closer to her, so close he can hear the curse she lets out at the sight of him. His hair is greased back, and he is wearing a dark paisley suit and overpowering cologne. A far cry from the orange uniform he had worn when she testified.

“What kind of a werewolf needs another to kill his prey?” Marta returns flatly.

Ransom’s grin sags. His hackles are clearly rising. “A new and efficient breed of wolf,” he supplies, downing a flute of something bubbly.

“I’m surprised you could afford a ticket to opening night.” Marta steels herself against his gaze by tightening her chiffon wrap around her shoulders. She feels so very exposed in her cocktail dress now. “They were awarded only to members of the Arts Foundation or those with generous charitable donations.”

“Marta, you know I’m a giving soul.”

She shakes her head, chandelier earrings rocking back and forth. “You dipped into what was left of your trust fund. That’s a lot of money to part with all to stroll in here fashionably late.”

For a second, Ransom seems surprised she knows anything at all about his residual finances. She certainly knows they are finite.

“Worth every penny to see that look on your face.”

Around them, onlookers and gossip mongers start to take notice. Ransom Drysdale and Marta Cabrera, the black sheep and the interloper, both at times accused of the murder of the great Harlan Thrombey. It will make quite a splash on page six.

“Is this the part where you threaten to make my life a living hell?” Marta hisses through clenched teeth, smiling wide for the flash of a camera. Ransom slips his hand over her bare shoulder. He’s warmer than expected, creatures like him must run so hot.

“No. This is the part where I threaten to make your _afterlife_ a living hell.”

* * *

To call the Thrombey family a pack of dogs is an insult to the most noble of creatures. They had none of the fabled unity or strength so often mythicized about their species. No principles or unbreakable vows. By all accounts, even Ransom and his crimes against the leader of the Thrombey pack had been forgiven. For the Thromeby pack, it seemed their bonds were steeped only in lavish comforts and a common enemy: Marta.

Linda was still petitioning the Boston enclave as well as any supranatural entities along the eastern seaboard. She still believe some vampiric power coaxed the Thrombey fortune from a Harlan to Marta. A hard sell, considering all who knew Harlan knew it would be impossible to enthrall him. But at least she was consistent.

Walt and Joni had changed up their persecution. Smear campaigns and false olive branches. Threats of roving wolves arriving at her door and dark full moon nights that could catch her unawares.

It is Ransom who's attacks are the most inventive.

“Is it true you can’t enter a home uninvited?” Ransom puzzles with his feet on her coffee table, flipping through on of Harlan’s books. Marta has just come down the stairs for the sunset. Between her and the bloodbag she left in the kitchen icebox is the smell of grass and forest moss and sunburn covering everything. Ransom has clearly made himself at home.

“No, it isn’t true. But waiting for an invitation is still good manners.”

“They do say that manners are a sign of good breeding.” Ransom tosses the leather bound books back onto a pile. He’s bent the binding. “They also say the bite of a werewolf is poison to a vampire. How about that one?”

“Never tested it. But they also say my kind is the only thing faster than yours. Leave, now. Before we both have to find out.”

Ransom doesn’t do as he is told, instead he bounds after her. She bypasses the kitchen. She can eat later. What she needs is in Harlan’s old library. 

“When were you first turned?” is his next pestering question.

“When men who look like you invaded my country.”

“Brazil, right?”

“It's like you want me to tear you apart.” Marta inspects Harlan’s favored knife display. Of the real knives, most are stainless steel or rusted iron. However, the dagger she lifts off the outer rim, is cold wrought silver.

“Hm, see that’s not a good idea for either of us.” Ransom’s blue eyes follow the tip of the knife. “Threats get us nowhere. Especially considering out history.”

“Our history, the times you set me up to take the fall for multiple murders?”

“I meant more of our shared cultural history. When was the last great Lycan/Dragul war? A hundred years ago? Longer?”

Marta sighs. A century is nothing to her, but he is not wrong. “What is your point?”

“My point is,” Ransom saunters closer, “that it may be an old peace, but we both sure as shit know its a tentative peace. So it’s better for everybody if we learn to live in peace. Lest we cause a species wide incident.”

Marta lowers the silver blade. “You’ve changed your tune since your last vow of revenge. Which means you’re lying.” Marta re-shelves the knife. Brute force had never been her nature, and it won’t solve a problem like Ransom Drysdale. He was clearly rethinking his plan of attack and how much effort he was willing to pay his little vendetta. “I’m not going to trust you again, Ransom.”

“That’s a real shame. I kinda liked the last time you trusted me. The whole doe-eyed innocent thing, looking at me like I was you hero, ready to come rescue you? That really got my dick hard. I didn’t know vamps could look that helpless.”

Marta rolls her eyes in disgust. She won’t dignify that with a response.

“I mean, it makes sense that you would lean more into the little lost girl look. All those ugly sweaters to hide with a conniving little minx you are. You in leather? That’d be a dead give away.”

Marta is rethinking her refusal to use the knife. “Or maybe not every vampire you meet is a sex dungeon fantasy. And maybe not every woman you meet wants to sleep with you. Especially the ones you frame for murder.”

“Sounds unlikely,” Ransom chides, arrogant and nonchalant and that’s when Marta shoves him. Racing at him with all her strength she knocks him back and away into the chair set before the knife display. Ransom lands heavily and gives a howl and bares his teeth but Marta is already sped before him, her nails digging into his throat.

“I didn’t ask Harlan for your family and I didn’t ask for your fortune. I only wanted to be his friend. And now that you’ve killed him, I have to remember him by remembering his wishes. You get nothing, Ransom. You win nothing.”

“Oh, but Marta,” he singsongs, “I hate to lose.”

“Get used to it.”

True to form, all of Harlan’s grandson’s forewarned recklessness rises up to take hold of the situation. His hands find his way to the back of her knees, rising up to her waist. She should break his hands, but it’s pointless. He would heal again in an instant. So Marta does the next best thing. She lets her fangs slip out. A sign of warning. 

She feels him shiver below her.

“One last question…” he tilts forward, heated breath in her ear. “Have you ever tasted a werewolf?”

“No,” Marta says quickly, quicker than she means to. She leans back out of his reach and realizes what she’s done. Her stomach gurgles and churns so loudly a human could hear it, let alone the animal before her. Marta flees an instant later to vomit into the wastebasket next to the desk. And Ramson grins with wolfish delight, mind racing with possibilities.

* * *

“Feeding from a wolf… that’s a violation of which treaty again? My memory is not quite as long as yours.” Yet again, Marta looks up to find Ransom crashing another event he is not invited to. This time it is the Blood Like Wine publishing company _—_ and no, the irony of the name does not escape her _—_ annual company luncheon. She can’t say she wasn’t expecting him. He finally had something of note to wield over her. “That’s definitely breaking with the covenant.”

“I could snap your neck and make it look like an accident.” The garden step stones are slippery and wet from the sprinklers. All it would take was a moment.

“You’re a vampire with a nursing certificate,” Ransom laughs. He sits down at the frosted glass table and waves down a waiter. “I’ve probably killed more people than you.”

“My profession meant I got to help people,” Marta snaps, defensive. She is tired. The sunbeams, pastels, and all the other trappings that came with being a millionairess were wearing her down to the bone. She was exhausted of being asked to try the fig and thyme goat cheese and if the salmon skewers agreed with her. She was very tempted to take a bite of the next server offering blood-orange refreshments. 

“Your profession also kept you swimming in all the blood you can drink,” Ransom surmises. “Werewolf blood. Harlan’s blood, if I had to guess.”

“I didn’t want to work for your grandfather. When I went to the interview and realized what he was, I tried to leave.” Marta sits back in her chair, adjusting her large brimmed sun hat. She wasn’t young enough to burst into flames anymore, but the daylight would always be stifling. “Harlan insisted I stay. He wanted us to help each other.”

“That dirty old man.” Ransom accepts a glass spring water despite taking a swig from a flask. **“He** saw a hungry vamp and seduced her.”

“Yes,” Marta says flatly. “That’s exactly what happened.”

Ransom almost chokes on his liquor. “Very funny.”

“How so?” Marta lets her fangs descend. Ransom doesn’t take his eyes off the sharpened point as she presses her tongue against it. He looks angry. Angrier than he should be about supposedly safeguarding his grandfather’s virtue.

“Are you trying to imply,” he says slowly, cautiously, “that you were fucking my grandfather?”

Marta adjusts her sunglasses on the bridge of her nose. She doesn’t back down from the challenge. She shrugs.

“Harlan and I loved each other very much.” That wasn’t a lie. Harlan had killed himself instead of letting Ransom’s little ploy incriminate her and have her dragged before the Enclave. That had to have been love.

“That’s not an answer.” Ransom tries in vain to smother his dark laughter with his hand. “You know that’s not an answer.”

“Miss Cabrera, Mister Drysdale, a photo for the Northeast Reporter?” They raise their glasses and smile and wait for the press to dissolve back into the crowd. When the coast is clear, Ransom turns on her again. With his hand on her knee under the table, he commands her attention.

“Tell me the truth. I’m not leaving without it.”

Marta covers his hand with her own. It is sad, how predictable he is. He thinks Harlan had something he cannot and now he wants to pout. There’s a wet crunch from beneath the table when she bends a few of his fingers back and breaks them. A clean shear fracture. Painful and honest and to the point.

“Enjoy the party, Ransom,” she tells him, stalking off to get out of this wretched blaze.

* * *

Marta checks into the Plaza and requests the most secluded suite available. Not because she thinks it will spare her Ransom and his tireless resentments. She is certain he will find a way to pop out of the woodwork even in the heart of urban Boston. But traveling to the Massachusetts countryside did get tiring. An old country house suited the roving and wild nature of wolves. For Marta, it took her too far from her food source.

It had been a long time since she scavenged for food. Nursing and human companions had kept her safe for so long. She misses Harlan now more than ever. The way his eyes shined when they first met. How in just the way only Harlan could, he had concocted an entire illicit plot for them with each to play a part. Marta would tell Harlan her stories, all the human life and wreckage she had seen and Harlan would hook himself up to an IV with some regularity, leaving blood bags in the cellar fridge for Marta to feast on.

Now, aimed with his fortune, Marta had concierges offering up menus by age and blood type, promising the fresh plucked blood of vegan nineteen-year-olds who would taste like nothing she had ever sampled before. It made Marta sick to her stomach, as if she had sung a chorus of lies.

Strolling the hallway to her suite, Marta smells him. “Is this the part when you step out of the shadows with some sarcastic remark?”

“Just about,” Ransom growls. His hand is healed, all in one piece. Though all his playful banter seems to have evaporated. “You turned down a free complimentary meal at the front desk.”

“It wasn’t to my taste.”

“Don’t like the young ones?”

Marta slides her key-card through the reader. “I don’t enjoy humans served on a platter. Especially not ones who were most likely groomed to be there.”

Ransom nods sagely, his face a mockery of Marta’s morals. “That’s why you picked Granddad. No one could get that old dog to do anything he didn’t want to do.”

“Why does my relationship with Harlan bother you so much?” she asks him once inside the suite. She doesn’t bother threatening to kick Ransom out. Their little dance will continue here within the dark washed walls and stately architecture the same as it had everywhere else. There is almost a comfort in it. “You _killed_ him. What more can you take from him?”

Ransom is uncharacteristically quiet. He watches her, but there is no telling what he sees. It’s just Marta standing there, the same as she had been for hundreds of years. Hair pinned back and her face wan with unending hunger. Even the sweater dress is old.

“I told you before, I don’t like to lose.”

“We’re not playing a game, Ransom.” 

He steps closer anyway. His animal aroma is stronger now without the cologne. In a moment that teeters on irrational, Marta wonders if the lycanthrope and their relationship to the moon is overblown. Ransom doesn’t favor of the night; he doesn’t possess its cold quiet and star-ridden depth. No. He is awash with heat and vigor and a spark of daylight that clings to his skin.

“Back at the manor, you wanted a taste.”

“Back at the manor, you wanted to get bitten.”

“So indulge me.”

Everything about this screams through her mind, _this is a trap._ Werewolves did not offer themselves up to her kind. Harlan was an exception, and even he had never submitted to a _bite_. And Ransom; this is only a game to Ransom. A new toy or a new drug he could test out. He does not understand the danger.

“Leave, Ransom, before you get yourself hurt.” There is an ache in her jaw. Her incisors want out.

Ransom wants it, too. He moves to grab her — stubborn reckless stupid overconfident idiot, the same as Harlan always called him — and nature takes over. Marta turns his momentum on him in seconds. He’s flat on his back on the ornate carpet, spread eagle and winded before he knows what hit him. She throws a leg over his side and sits on him like he’s a throne, holding his wrists down with her hands. He doesn’t even fight to get up, staring up at her through the curtain of hair cascading around her face. She has never been this hungry before, not in hundreds of years. She can hear his blood, rumbling through his arteries, pooling in his chest and groin.

“Fuck me, what are you waiting for? Do you need me to ask nicely?”

“Yes,” Marta says, absent-minded, lingering on the smell of him. Iron and red meat, dry wood and wet ink, musk deer and spice. A healthy meal. “I wanna hear you say please.”

“Pretty please,” he smirks.

“No, not good enough. Say it like you mean it.” Marta runs her knuckles along the length of his throat. He cranes his neck to lean into her touch. She shakes her head as she rips his shirt open. “You could beg so much better than that.”

He knocks his head back against the floor. “ _Fuckin’ a —_ I want it, please just _give_ it to me. The bite, I want to feel—”

He wants to feel her teeth sticking into the side of his carotid artery. He wants to feel everything that is him slip away at her pleasure, at her desire. He wants her to suck up the most essential part of him, the pulsating wolfsblood and savor it between her lips and at the back of her throat. He wants to be tasted again and again, he wants to wanted until it kills him. Like dissolving like, greed devouring greed.

A knock came at the door. The singular sound echos all through out the suite and Marta realizes what a mistake she is making, scurrying up from his body, dizzy with bloodlust.

Ransom clambers off the floor, muttering about ripping throats open with his claws and various death threats against room service when Marta opens the door. On the other side is a stranger she does not know. He is not wearing a hotel uniform. Nor are his companions.

“Marta Cabrera?”

“Yes.”

“Ransom Thrombey?”

“Drysdale,” he corrects, “but what of it?”

“It’s them,” the first says to the others. He draws a sharpened stake from under his coat. Marta steps back. Ransom steps forward. 

“Gentlemen, is that really necessary?” He holds his hands up in faux-surrender. “She’s literally the most boring vampire you could possibly meet. Hunting her is like fishing in a barrel. But you’re in luck, I think Count Chocula checked in a couple rooms over; why not go pay him a visit?”

“I don’t think they’re here to kill just me,” Marta tells him, aware of the silver glints held in the gloved hands of the others.

“Oh,” Ransom says, actually surprised. “Hm. Well that changes things. For the better, actually, considering how you just cockblocked me.” He throws the door open wider with a dramatic flourish he most definitely inherited from Harlan. Marta hears the change before she sees it. The crack of bone and the pop of gristle under his skin. Muscle and tendons expanding and a long heavy snout filled with rows of white gleaming teeth.

Then the carnage begins.

* * *

“It’s a good thing you’re loaded,” Ransom says after, swathed in a plush bathrobe and picking his human teeth with a toothpick. “I do not envy you the cleaning fee.” He’s not wrong. There is blood everywhere except on him and Marta’s stomach is growling. But she isn’t hungry for anything left splattered on the floor.

“You didn’t have to chase down the ones that were running away,” she snaps heatedly. There is a prominent vein pulsing in Ransom’s neck. Mostly full of adrenaline, from the kill, from the quick succession of bodily change. Marta can taste it. “It’s called overkill, Ransom.”

“Why do you even care?” he asks, half snarling. His eyes darken and he focuses only on her. “They came here to kill you. So I made them regret it.”

“They are dead. They don’t regret anything now. And they came here to kill _us_ ,” Marta sighs. “Probably because you go out of your way to be seen in public with me at every opportunity. People are going to think we’re breaking the covenant.”

“Marta, we kind of are breaking the covenant.” He waggles his eyes suggestively. His humor does not exceed the full fledged intent in his gaze. “And doesn’t that make it so much more fun? A thousand years ago Dracula and the Big Bad Wolf said we couldn’t… so naturally we have to.”

Part of Marta wants to rise to his provocation. Wants to unlock a part of her she sealed away years ago. Wants to reward the brutal unflinching violence he doled out so easily on her behalf. Wants to marvel at the beautiful picture he spray painted the walls with every slash and bite. She thinks to herself he might make a fine attack dog; or an even better lap dog. The ferocious delight he inspired in her could quickly become an addiction.

“No, we’re not,” she decides, hunger pains all but ebbing. “I’m not fucking you, and I’m feeding from you. Just like I didn’t fuck or feed off your grandfather, not like you think. We put his blood in bags and left it in a freezer. It always tasted like plastic.” She isn’t sure why she suddenly wants to be so honest. The truth just runs out of her.

“What would I taste like?”

“Wet dog.”

Ransom looks offended for half a second. “You’re trying so hard to kill the mood. It’s obvious. But in case you didn’t know, telling me you didn’t fuck my grandfather may be the hottest thing I’ve heard in forever. A total turn on.”

Marta is already shaking her head, pushing past him, traipsing out to the elevator to settle her account with hotel management.

* * *

Word spreads quickly of the eviscerated mess left at the Plaza. Marta knows a new hotel reservation will be hard to come by for some time. “You could always crash at my place,” comes Ransom’s offer outside the hotel. He’s seated his car, turning over the engine to the Beemer. Still insatiable, still trying to lure her into the passenger's seat.

“I’ll be fine,” she tells him through the window. “I know a few good bell towers.”

“You aren’t serious,” he accuses, and she smiles. He slaps the steering wheel in frustration. “Fuck a duck, you are serious.”

Marta chuckles. She’s not sure when she learned to find his childish expletive laden antics charming. Certainly not when he tried plunging a knife into her chest. But he’s charming nonetheless. She’s sure it’s all a part of his clinical sociopathy. 

“Not a week ago you were threatening to ruin my afterlife. Now you want me to suck the life out of you.”

“A week ago I hadn’t seen your fangs out. C’mon. What if I told you I was a werewolf with a sex dungeon?” The motor to the beemer growls low and even. He’s making no move to shift gears, unhurried to do anything but beckon her closer.

Tempting. So very tempting.

“What if I asked you… asked you if you really, really thought this through?” She holds up her hands when Ransom cooks up some smartass retort. “I mean it,. I mean down to the bone, down to the marrow. You want to know if you like the bite. But do you want to know what happens if I like it? If I like how you taste? There’s no coming back from that, Ransom.”

It’s the human part of him that looks away from her then, staring out the windshield, eyes glued forward. It is the part of him that has the slightest inkling of fear, the last sliver of self preservation. Marta can’t blame him, but it hurts nevertheless, somewhere deep in her bloodless heart.

When he looks back, Marta is already gone.

* * *

Boston did not have much in the way of bell towers, which did nothing for Marta’s nostalgia. But the city is still old enough for a few old world revivals. The stone and clay landing of the belfry she settled in kept her above the noise of the human nightlife below. The bell metal bronze hanging from the turrets overhead bore the inscripts of heavenly words and celestial bodies that Marta may have believed in once. It was cold comfort in its own way.

She hears him arrive. The motor of his beloved car ceasing down below. She can pick out his scent from a crowd now. A worrying new trait. A sign of a dangerous craving. In all her years Marta had never let herself hunger this profoundly. Her cold, infernal spark of eternity had never been an excuse to torture, to inflame some sickly sadistic impulse. Marta had been the epitome of willpower. She had been good; too good to now want to stake Hugh Ransom Drysdale down by his pressure points and watch how slow he could bleed and for long.

Marta leans back into the open arched windows. Ransom has trudged to the top of the stairs. All wolfish grins and that famed Thrombey overconfidence. The look on his face only slips when Marta has her hand down his pants and his back to the brickwork. He doesn’t expect her grip to be quite so tight or her teeth so very, very sharp. He’d best have blood enough to feed her and please her as well. More than a human at least. If a vampire is more than a mere mortal death, a werewolf should be more than a mortal life.

He screams when she strikes. The bells above them ring out from the vibration of the sound. With blood on her chin when she draws back, she admires the way Ransom groans with little sputtering breaths. He shakes at the knees, mewling like the wounded animal he is. Marta licks her lips, running her finger through her red, oozing handiwork.

“See?” he moans, head lulling to the side, “tastes better than wet dog…”

“Hm,” Marta murmurs with growing satiation, “no, you taste… medium rare… too much bourbon… sunripe… but mostly you taste like you’re mine.”

She rears back to tear him open again. Let more of her venom course into his veins. It’s going to hurt like nothing he’s known and it won’t stop until she is satisfied. He’s still begging, lightheaded and blissed, all out and at her mercy. Marta obliges him over and over, beyond guilt or shame or fear. If this is what breaks her humane streak after all these years… well, it could not have happened to a nicer guy.

**_fin._ **


End file.
